<div dir="ltr">Perlbal, for those of you unfamiliar with the name, is a software load balancer written in Perl.<br>It was written by Brian Fitzpatrick and Danga Interactive (later bought to Six Apart of Movable Type fame) as part of the Live Journal stack.<br>

It provides a sophisticated load balancer, reverse proxy and web server with some advanced features such as sub-requests.<br><br>Anyway, the code was written to be very backwards compliant. It also uses the &quot;fields&quot; pragma, which has since been deprecated and they had to add a notification to remove warnings for deprecated features so people who use a relatively new Perl won&#39;t see warnings all over the place.<br>

<br>This has yielded in a great speed improvement and is yet another nail to the coffin of the age-old irrelevant claim of &quot;if it ain&#39;t broken, don&#39;t fix it&quot;, which usually does not apply to software as people would hope.<br>